Aside from the people who control the hardware, and the NSA/others seem to have control over those people, getting them to install monitoring hardware.
"I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric"
I am able to be prosecuted for creating "hacking tools" while Endgame Systems has the NSA pay them a million+ a year to access data from those "hacking tools."
'There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year. The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million.[1]'
In this environment of immunity granted to profiteers while my friends and I are prosecuted, it is "us vs. them."
Stop attempting to blow out meaningless opinions like "The NSA is on our side" in response to articles showing the opposite.